Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
During manufacturing of various items, machinery may be used to either automate or assist in a portion of the process. For example, some machinery may be computer controlled in order to perform precise measurements or operations. Additionally, machinery may be used to repeatedly perform a task in a consistent manner.
Successful production of fuel injector nozzles may include the creation of holes according to strict process characteristics. For acceptable performance of fuel injectors, the nozzle flow variation from one piece-part to the next should be tightly controlled. Various parameters of the nozzle are typically controlled with fairly tight tolerances. The process may control hole diameter, position, and geometric accuracy (e.g. cylindricity) of the hole creation. Additionally, the process may have a tolerance for the concentricity between different-diameter portions of the nozzle-holes (the step-hole and the flow-hole). The process may also have tight control of both the length of the smaller-diameter portion of the nozzle-hole (the flow-hole) and of surface finish and edge quality. Additionally, it may desirable for the system operating economics to be tightly controlled. From a system economics point of view, it may be desirable for the system to have low cycle time with high efficiency and utilization. It may also be desirable for the system to have low change-over times to switch from one piece-part model to the next. Additionally, it may be desirable for the disclosed system to have high flexibility to accommodate piece-part design changes as well as up-stream and down-stream process changes.
Traditional, existing production equipment designs can achieve some but not all of the characteristics listed above. For example, some designs achieve good nozzle flow variation at the expense of production economics. Other designs achieve low cycle time and high efficiency at the expense of change-over time and flexibility.